Dalai Lama Finds China's Threats A Subject for Humor and Anxiety

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Among the pilgrims who flock to the Dalai Lama's home-in-exile in these Himalayan hills, many regard him as a living god -- some of them Buddhist monks like the Dalai Lama himself, others refugees from faiths and places far removed from his native Tibet.

Since he fled to India in 1959, the Tibetan leader has grown accustomed to the cult of reverence in which Tibetans and non-Tibetans have enveloped him, especially since his teachings on nonviolence earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. But when the veneration gets a bit too much, the 60-year-old Tibetan has a way of puncturing the balloon.

In the 1960's, the Chinese Communists described me as a wolf in a monk's robe, as a murderer and a rapist," he said in an interview in an old bungalow here that is part of the compound given to the Tibetans by the Indian Government. "Then there are people who call me a Living Buddha."

"But these are two extremes," he said, breaking into a throaty chuckle. "In reality, I am just an ordinary human being." If this were true, the Dalai Lama could contemplate a quiet retirement here, after a life that was never his own from the moment in 1940 when he was installed, as a 5-year-old peasant's son, on the Dalai Lama's throne.

But recent years have underlined his importance as the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhists, and Beijing's apparent determination to whittle away his influence among the six million Tibetans in China.

The Dalai Lama has rarely been more alienated from the Chinese leadership than he is now. In January 1995, 15 years of sporadic and ultimately unproductive contacts with Chinese intermediaries on Tibet's future were broken off by China. Since then, China has reverted to a bitter hostility, to the Dalai Lama and to Buddhist institutions in Tibet.

Amnesty International says China began a new wave of arrests among Tibetans monks, nuns and independence activists about the time it broke off talks with the Dalai Lama. The rights group has published detailed reports of beatings of those arrested, and Chinese officials warned recently that they would close monasteries and nunneries if resistance continued.

The crackdown is a return to patterns that China has followed for decades. Although the repression eased after 1979, when Deng Xiaoping began the dialogue with the Dalai Lama by saying everything was negotiable except Tibet's remaining part of China, the cumulative damage has been enormous.

According to pamphlets issued by the Dalai Lama's office, the Chinese have closed or destroyed more than 6,000 monasteries and killed 1.2 million Tibetans since Communist troops overran Tibet in 1950.

Along with the current crackdown, the old vituperation against the Dalai Lama has crept back. Official Chinese diatribes have described him as a "splitist" and a "traitor" for not accepting China's demands that he acknowledge Tibet as "an inseparable part of China."

China also demands that he dismantle the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmsala, and "stop engaging in activities to split the motherland," including his frequent overseas trips to promote Tibet's cause.

In November, the confrontation took a turn for the worse when China engineered the installation of its own candidate for the position of Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most important religious official.

The move, seven months after the Dalai Lama announced his own nomineee, left Tibetans with two 6-year-old boys, each identified as the reincarnation of the former Panchen Lama, who died in Beijing in 1989 at age 50. The Dalai Lama's choice, Gendun Choekyi Nyima, has disappeared, apparently into house arrest in Beijing, along with his parents and 50 monks and Tibetan laypeople associated with his nomination.

Some Tibetan officials suggest there may even have been moves in the last year by China's security agencies to mount an attempt on the Dalai Lama's life in Dharmsala, or perhaps against senior members of his entourage.

In December, the Indian authorities arrested three young Tibetans who crossed into India from Tibet earlier in the year in the guise of refugees. According to Tibetan officials here, two men and a woman, all in their 20's, are being held in an Indian jail after telling investigators they were recruited by Chinese security agencies, trained in techniques of infiltration, intelligence-gathering and weapons-handling and sent here to keep watch on the Dalai Lama.

Tempa Tsering, information chief in the exile government, said diaries taken from the three showed they watched the Tibetan leader closely. "They told us that they had been ordered to settle in Dharmsala and wait for further instructions," he said. The Indian authorities have tightened the Dalai Lama's security, assigning additional policemen to keep a round-the-clock watch inside his compound in the village of McLeod Ganj, 6,000 feet up in the hills above Dharmsala.

In the presence of a man who bears the titles of Holy Lord, Gentle Glory and Ocean of Wisdom, there is an absence of the portentousness that often accompanies a meeting with a president or prime minister. But behind the jocularity with which he greeted a visitor, the Dalai Lama seemed like a man with his patience wearing thin. At one moment he was joshing about his chances of living another 20 or 30 years. The next he was discussing the possibility that China may have entertained the idea of having him killed.

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From what he had been told, he said, the three young intruders had said they had instructions to keep a watch on him. But whether this meant they might have planned to kill him was something else.

"I don't consider that someone will want to threaten my life," he said. "Personally, I have no enemies."

By discussing the possibility of an assassination attempt, he offered a measure of the distance he and his onetime interlocutors in China have traveled since the 1980's, when they held more than a decade of secret discussions on Tibet.

The talks culminated in 1988 in a speech by the Dalai Lama in Strasbourg, France, in which he offered publicly for the first time a formula he has called "the middle way" -- a future in which Tibet would remain part of China but with wide autonomy in all matters except foreign policy and defense.

China denounced the formula, calling it "a disguised form of independence," but even making the offer came at a cost for the Dalai Lama. Tibetan exiles, especially the younger ones, saw it as a betrayal of Tibet's claim to independence.

China's return to a hard-line policy has found its clearest expression in the machinations over the new Panchen Lama. Behind arguments about the obscure procedures involved in divining which Tibetan child is the reincarnation of the spirit of the dead lama, the two Panchen Lamas -- China's, and the Dalai Lama's -- seem like an embodiment of the two Tibets, one favored by the Dalai Lama that would be semi-free, the other wholly a captive of China.

To Tibetans, China's willingness to hijack procedures that are at the heart of the mystique of Tibetan faith is almost the ultimate affront, the more so since Chinese statements in recent months have heaped contempt on the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama. The Chinese have asserted that he once drowned a dog, "a heinous crime in the eyes of Buddha," and that his parents were "notorious for speculation, deceit and scrambling for fame and profit." China's nominee, Gyaltsen Norbu, has been presented as a paragon of Buddhist virtues.

"My main concern is for the Panchen Lama himself," the Dalai Lama said, referring to Gendun Choekyi Nyima, his own nominee, of whose whereabouts Chinese officials have professed ignorance. The Tibetan leader said he feared that the boy could be subjected to brainwashing.

"It's a clear example of bullying and shortsightedness," he said of China's actions.

Under pressure to find ways of responding to China's assertiveness, the Dalai Lama has been confronted by Tibetan youths who have urged a return to the kind of armed insurgency that was mounted against Chinese rule in the 1950's. But these youths, he said, should think things through.

"It's very easy to see these mujahedeen in Afghanistan and the Middle East, but if we really put it in practice -- first of all, sufficient weapons, from where? And how to send them to Tibet? Through India? Impossible. Through Nepal? Impossible. One or two guns, maybe; nothing more."

In any event, he said, if Tibetans stuck to nonviolence, they would find that things in China would change in ways that would make possible political concessions that are currently unimaginable. Behind the stern mask of the current Chinese leadership, he said, there are strong democratic stirrings in China.

"I always believed that the Tienanmen Square massacre was a temporary setback for the democratic movement," he said.

A visitor here does not have to go far to find people, some close to the Dalai Lama, and not all of them young, whose respect for him as a spiritual leader is accompanied by a sense that he is a dreamer. Among these people, it was a matter for black humor when the Dalai Lama was quoted recently as saying he expected to be back in the 1,000-room Potala Palace in Lhasa by the end of the decade.

While conceding that this may have been an exaggeration, the Tibetan leader said he still believed that a breakthrough would come within five years, and that he would live to sit once more on the Lion's Throne that is the Dalai Lama's traditional seat of power in Lhasa. If people think he is dreaming, he said, they should look at recent history, for example in the former Soviet Union and in South Africa.

"And so it will be in our case," he said. "We have had our own dark period for 40 years, but for us too, things will surely change."

A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 1996, on Page A00008 of the National edition with the headline: Dalai Lama Finds China's Threats A Subject for Humor and Anxiety. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe